This project has already launched.

At age 25, after experiencing most of my adult life from the shadows, I decided enough was enough. It was time to get help. My “dark days” were becoming more frequent, more long lasting and the dark feelings were becoming more severe. Very quickly, I was diagnosed with depression, sent for CBT and put on antidepressants.

What happens then, while you’re figuring out who you are with depression, trying to learn techniques for dealing with it and how to live with it, when you’re diagnosed with breast cancer, aged 26.

Cue a whole new world of uncertainty, a double whammy of mental anguish and a(n un)healthy amount of worrying. And a whole lot of trying to find humour in the very, very darkest of places.

How do you not fall apart? You can’t. Sometimes you do fall apart. But you get back up and you piece yourself back together, even on the days you think you can’t bear to.

Life, Lemons and Melons is one girl’s story of figuring out life when it hands you a whole heap of lemons and you don’t have the energy to make lemonade or even reach for the gin. It’s a funny story about things that aren’t that funny and a coming of age story that came a few years later (or earlier) than expected. It’s about mortality, health, the pressures of the modern world, trying to be positive when your heart feels like it’s being repeatedly trodden on by an elephant and finding humour in getting diagnosed with breast cancer aged 26 when you carry a black dog around with you every day.

It’s essentially about the life of every twenty something - but with some added mental anguish and the mild inconvenience which is cancer thrown into the mix. A recipe for disaster? Maybe. A good story? Hopefully.

The book will be made up of personal experience essays to present a full picture of what it’s like living with depression and then being diagnosed with cancer. Cos life is sometimes super kind. You can get a feel for my writing and what the book'll be like here.

I'm hoping that this book will help anyone who's ever heard the words "it's breast cancer" or who's ever had a battle with their brain.